The Viva Las Vegas Intermediate Guide To IO's
This guide is for people who are confident enough to go beyond Peterpeter's guide without necessarily wanting to do algebra to get their powers to work right. If you read Peterpeter's excellent basic guide (
here ) you'll notice that it kind of stops where the IO's [in my opinion] start. This guide tends to assume level 32 to 50 characters- before that, I wouldn't worry about sets.
It is not exhaustive, it is not intricate, it will not give you the One True Path. It will help you get most of the good out of IO's without having to spend 100 million influence or breaking out a calculator.
If all you want to know is "How do I slot? What do I buy?" go to the Examples section. I play with numbers because I enjoy it; other people don't have to like what I like.
First: The basic knowledge.
Almost all of you know almost all of this but I wanted to go over it anyway. If you miss one of these things, you could burn a million influence on something that doesn't work in your build.
[*] Enhancement Diversification means anything over 90% is pretty much wasted. That's three SO's or [after level 25] three IO's.
[*] You cannot slot the EXACT same enhancement ["Mako's Bite Accuracy/Damage"] twice in the same power. You can slot two Mako's Bite- one acc/damage, one damage/endurance- in the same power. You can slot two acc/damage if they are from different sets( Mako's Bite and Crushing Blow) in the same power. You can slot two Mako's Bite acc/damage in two different powers.
[*] Pay attention to what an enhancement tells you it goes into. When you hover over the picture of the enhancement, you will see something like "Ranged Damage".
[*] You want at least one SO of accuracy in each attack power; for most powers I like 1.5 .
[*] If you slot two or more of the same set ["Mako's Bite Acc/Damage" and "Mako's Bite Acc/Damage/Endurance/Recharge"] in the same power, you get a little bonus for each thing you slot . Five slots? You get a bonus for 2, different bonus for the 3rd, different bonus for the 4th and different bonus for the 5th. You get all four of those bonuses.
[*] You can add the same "little bonus" up to five times. No more than five, even if they're from different sets. 3% Resistance and 3.11% Resistance are different little bonuses!
[*] "Recovery" means Endurance Recovery, like Stamina gives; "Regeneration" means HP Regeneration, like Health gives.
[*]
[u]IMPORTANT[u] : price out the salvage before you buy the "set IO". If something says it needs "Pangaean Soil", at the moment you have to be a 3-millionaire to get it.
Second: The Math.
Can you add halves? Good. If you want to know the approximations I used, I listed those in appendix A.
Ignoring IO's that give "special benefits" [like chance to stun or anti-knockback] all IO's either do one thing [like Red Fortune: Defense] or two or more things [Red Fortune: Defense/Endurance.] If they do two or more things, count each thing as half an IO of benefit. Attack/Damage/Range? Half/half/half. (I will call them "Duals", "Triples", and "Quads". ) There are two exceptions we care about
:
[*] A quad, like Mako's Bite: Accuracy/Damage/Endurance/Recharge (or Acc/Dam/End/Rech for short) it is a little weak. If you slot a quad and a dual that do the same thing [Acc/Dam and Acc/Dam/End/Rech] you still end up with more than two "halves" in Acc and Dam, but ... you might come up short if you use quads and triples only.
[*] Two duals that cover the same thing give you some gravy. [Acc/Dam and Dam/Rech gives you more than one Dam. ] Three duals gives you a little less than two full IO's. Four duals produces five halves.
No matter what else, you want to get, at least, 1 Accuracy and 3 Damage in damage powers, at least 3 Defense in defense powers... get as good as what you're doing now.
That's it!
Third and most importantly: Slotting set IO's to get a lot more out of a power.
"how much more?" Well, if you JUST take the example of a ranged attack power 6-slotted with generic IO's versus one 6-slotted with Thunderstrike, and you pretend there are no set bonuses:
Generic:
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Acc
Dam
Dam
Dam
Rech
End
-------
1 Acc, 3 Dam, 1 Rech, 1 End.
</pre><hr />
Thunderstrike:
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Acc / Dam
Dam/ End
Dam/ Rech
Acc/ Dam/ End
Acc/ Dam/ Rech
Dam/ End/ Rech
__________________
1.5 Acc, 3 Dam, 1.5 End, 1.5 Rech
</pre><hr />
Half an Acc IO, half an End IO, and half a Rech IO better- not counting the "gravy" from duals .
Set bonus on that would be something like 1/8 of a recharge and 1/4 of an Acc IO- you really get most of the benefit out of just "adding extra slots to the power. "
"So which sets should I use?" It doesn't matter. I used Thunderstrike because it's cheap, common, easy to find, flexible, and nicely balanced. The melee equivalent is Crushing Impact. But the point here is, if you had a Devastation Dam/Recharge, with a Ruin Acc/Dam/Rech, it wouldn't matter. The main thing is that they add up to more than 1 IO of benefit.
If you are thinking about another set for some reason, go to this complex, weird Paragonwiki page:
http://paragonwiki.com/Invention_Ori...hancement_Sets
There's a ton of great information there, but you don't need all of it.
Five things, you need.
FIRST: The "yellow gunsights" are comparatively easy to find and slot. Critters drop them when arrested. The "red gunsights" are harder, but still possible just from drops. There are also "mission completion" IO's, which show up fairly regularly. Everything else comes from trials [like respecs] and task forces. This means that they are REALLY rare and usually expensive. Not only is the IO rare, so are the ingredients- and the ingredients can cost a lot more than the recipe .
SECOND: If you have a particular IO already and you like it, use it. Look up the set it's in and admire it.
THIRD: You may really find an idea cool- like "chance to disorient" in Executioner's Contract, or "anti-knockback" in Steadfast Protection.
FOURTH: You might see a set bonus you like. For instance... "Four slot this set for extra damage to everything you own." Work towards that.
FIFTH: Always make sure you're not neglecting the basics. Total up to 1 Acc/3 Damage, or 3 Damage resistance. At least.
DEFENSE WORKS DIFFERENTLY:
The "D" powers (Defense or Damage resistance) work differently. There's not really a go-to power set for D-powers, for me. Why? I don't want what the D-sets do. For an attack, there's real benefits to accuracy, damage, endurance AND recharge. For most D-powers, there's "D" and... maybe endurance. A D/recharge invention is just "half a D" for nearly every Scrapper and Tanker power out there. On the other hand, since normally you slot one End and three D, at most, you COULD put in more slots and get set bonuses with them. Seems like a waste of slots to me, but I'm still learning. Here's five ideas I can think of- haven't experimentally compared them.
From simplest to most complex:
1. Four slots: Pick any two "D/End" powers, and fill the other two slots with generic D-power enhancements. You get gravy on D and gravy on End and it's the same otherwise. EVERY set has a D/end power in it. ( Note: I tried this and a firetank armor went from 38.3% End Reduction/57.3% damage reduction to 49.2% End reduction and 58.3% damage reduction. )
2. Four slots: Pick any two "D/End"powers and the matching "D" powers from their sets. This gives you two small set bonuses, for free, and is otherwise the same as 1.
3. Four, five, or six slots: Slot the set and only the set. If you find a set bonus you really like, and want a bunch of, you might want to slot for it. You may also, in this case, end up under three SO's of "D" bonus. You better REALLY like that set bonus.
4. Five or six slots: 4-slot or 5-slot a set, and slot a generic "D" to get you over the desired 3-slot limit.
5. Five slots: The Bonus. If there's a single IO that gives you something you want [like the Impervium Armor "psi resist" or the Steadfast "+3% global defense"] you can slot like option 1 or 2 above (2 D/end and 2 D) and add the extra goodie in an extra slot.
SET BONUSES:
There are a lot of set bonuses, and most of them are weird and useless. .63% fire/cold resistance, yay? However, there are a LOT of set bonuses, so some of them are going to be helpful to some people. However, it's math-intensive and beyond the scope of this guide.
[u]WARNING[u]: If you try to get the 5-slot or 6-slot bonus, you may actually be hurting what the power is supposed to do! There is a snipe set where, if you 6-slot it, you get like 1.5 IO's of damage... in that case, you better love the bonus more than you love the snipe.
UNIQUE IO's:
Some of the invention-origin enhancements are unique- only one can be slotted on your entire character- and some might as well be because you will probably only ever see one per character. They usually give something HUGE, almost like having a pool power. There are three big ones in heals [Miracle, Numina's Convalescence, and Regenerative Tissue] which, if you got all three, would nearly replace (unslotted) Health and Stamina . There's three that give Stealth and fit in a travel power. There's one that might replace Acrobatics [I haven't tried it myself.] There's one that's nearly Tactics-level .There's one that gives you Build Up (!) at random after any attack. Yes, for the full ten seconds.
At the moment, they're selling for something like 40 million each and there's a line of people bidding on them, with "0 for sale" . They're Wonka Golden tickets. Worrying about them will just give you stress.
EXAMPLES:
Putting it all together, here are some examples. All are attacks, all can be done fairly cheaply. You can often build stepping stones on the way- so for "Do everything better and faster" you can do the paired Accuracies first, then the paired Endurance later. Watch out for "slotting one set IO and temporarily gimping the power!"
[u]FOUR SLOTS:[u]
"Gravy" - this is a VERY slight improvement to the power. But it's the easiest thing to put in. You replace one "A" and one "B" with two "A/B" IO's. EVERY attack set has an Acc/Dam; I checked.
Acc/Dam (Any set)
Acc/Dam (any other set)
two Damage (generic)
"Just Slightly Better". This is, as it says, just a little better at both Endurance and Recharge. Half an SO better.
Acc/Damage/End (Thunderstrike or Ruin/ranged; Crushing Impact/melee)
Acc/Damage/Rech (thunderstrike or Crushing IMpact)
two Damage
"5 slots for the price of 4": (ranged) Like it says, free End Reduction!
Acc/Dam/End (Thunderstrike)
Acc/dam/End (Ruin)
Damage (Generic)
Damage (Generic)
"Do Everything Badly At Once": (Melee) Don't do this without a REALLY good reason. This gives you just under one Acc, just under three Dam, just under one End and just under one Recharge. To add insult to injury, pulverizing fisticuffs is available at "worse than SO" levels only.
Acc/dam/End/Rech (Mako's bite)
Acc/dam/End/Rech (pulverizing fisticuffs)
Damage (generic)
Damage(generic)
[u]FIVE OR MORE SLOTS:[u]
"Do Everything Better At Once": (melee)
Same as Do Everything Badly, but you put an Acc/Damage/End or Acc/damage/Rech [depending on which you care about] from Crushing IMpact in. You now have a really good power in five slots.
"Do Everything Better And Faster"(Blaster version):
Acc/dam/Rech (Thunderstrike)
Acc/Dam/Rech(Ruin)
Dam/Rech/End (Thunderstrike)
Dam/Rec/End (Maelstrom's Fury)
Damage (generic)
You now have a 5-slotted attack with one accuracy, three damage, two IO's of recharge and one of Endurance.
[u]INTRO TO SET BONUSES:[u]
These are a couple of things I set up to show what set bonuses CAN do for you. As my thinking changes, these will probably become obsolete.
"Regen Blaster":
Devastation (any two)
Entropic Chaos (Any two)
"more damage"
This provides 22% Regeneration bonus in the two Set bonuses. You can stack this, you can put it in snipes as well as normal single-target attacks. Four powers slotted this way will get you more than 3-slotted health... and less than 1-slotted Quick Regen. So you're a long way from Regen... but it's free health! WARNING: these are probably gonna be expensive sets, especially Devastation. You need the fifth slot to get yourself up to 3 damage... Note that if you pick all "Duals" you have 5 halves of damage already!
"Faster and meaner".
5-slot two melee attacks with Crushing Impact. Might get expensive. But you get +10% recharge, +14% accuracy [that's like "half an SO" of accuracy, across the board.] You may feel you need a sixth slot to get you over "three damage". I recommend the remaining Crushing Impact IO, because it looks so nice slotting the whole set.
CONCLUSION:
Inventions let you blow stuff up faster, better, and more accurately with no loss of damage. Let me know how it goes!
This guide is dedicated to Viva Las Vegas, my SG, and to my wife... who blows stuff up REAL good.
